lendid intellects of the
Establishment. The Nonconformists--well, they never talk about their own
decline; of all the divisions of Christianity they always seem to me
heartily to enjoy persecution; and like myself, I never knew them to
admit the word _decadence_ into their vocabulary, at least about
themselves. I hold them up to you as examples. Let us all be
Nonconformists in that respect.

I do not ask you to adopt the habit against which Matthew Arnold directed
one of his witty essays, the habit of expressing a too unctuous
satisfaction with the age and time in which we are living. That was the
intellectual error of the Eighteenth Century. There are problems of
poverty, injustice, disease, and unhappiness, which should make the most
prosperous and most selfish of us chafe; but I do urge that we should not
suspect the art and literature of our time, the intellectual
manifestations of our age, whether scientific or literary. I urge that
we do not sit on the counter in order to cry 'stinking fish,' and observe
that this is merely an age of commerce. An overweening modesty in us
seems to persuade us that it is quite impossible we should be fortunate
enough to be the contemporaries of great men. The fact that we know them
personally sometimes undermines our faith; contemporary contempt for a
great man is too often turned on the contemporaries. Do not let us look
upon genius, as Schopenhauer accused some people of doing, 'as upon a
hare which is good to eat when it has been killed and dressed up, but so
long as it is alive only good to be shot at.' And if our intellectuals
are not all Brobdingnagians, they are not all Liliputians. It seems to
me ungenerous to make sweeping and deprecating assertions about our own
time; it is also dangerous. The contemporary praise of unworthy work,
ephemeral work--there is always plenty of that, we know--is forgotten;
and (though it does not decay) perishes with the work it extolled. But
unsound criticism and foolish abuse of great work is remembered to the
confusion of the critics. Think of the reception accorded to Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Rossetti, and Swinburne.

I remember that excellent third-rate writer, W. E. H. Lecky, making a
speech at a dinner of the Authors' Society, in which he said that he was
sorry to say there were no great writers alive, and no stylists to
compare with those who had passed away. A few paces off him sat Walter
Pater, Geo